Film Review: You instead (15) No stars!

I FELT sorry for film director David Mackenzie when he told me in 2003 how production on The Last Great Wilderness – which should then have been his breakthrough movie – had been badly hit by the foot and mouth crisis.

I FELT sorry for film director David Mackenzie when he told me in 2003 how production on The Last Great Wilderness – which should then have been his breakthrough movie – had been badly hit by the foot and mouth crisis. Nightmare.

After seeing Ewan McGregor starring in Young Adam, and then Jamie Bell in Hallam Foe, you could see how Wilderness might have been a much better film than the tedious mess it became.

Not after sitting through this mind-numbing 80 minutes of nonsense which feels like such a self-inflicted disaster.

Debut written by painter Thomas Leveritt, it’s the story of two rival band members who are handcuffed together at the T in the Park rock festival in Kinross-shire. Luke Treadaway plays indie star Adam, half of a hit duo called The Make.

Natalia Tena is Morello, lead singer with an all-girl punk band called The Dirty Pinks.

The pair have no chemistry since the cringeworthy plot is shambolic and pointless.

From the horribly-jerky opening credits, to the attempts for either Adam or Morello to go the loo (or even to share a bed with two other people while remaining cuffed themselves), You Instead will have you shaking your head at a rock festival for all of the wrong reasons.

The point of such events is to go there and to forget the outside world, so why do we need a film version?

Shooting on the hoof in just five days, Mackenzie tries to capture the experience through weak characters bolted on to a real festival.

He’d have been better off trying to make a conventional documentary with real people at its heart.

Mackenzie can redeem himself on October 7 – when his new Ewan McGregor film, Perfect Sense, is out.